Tip of the Iceberg

During AD111, I mentioned that SSJS supports custom @Functions, but advised against defining your own. My primary reason for advising against it is the possibility that IBM may, in a future version of Domino, implement their own version of whatever custom function you decided to define. Back when version 6 was released, I saw far too many apps break because developers had defined their own LotusScript Replace() function in previous versions.

On the other hand, XPages are capable of so much by comparison to traditional Notes apps that it's inevitable that we'll occasionally identify functionality we'd like to encapsulate into a function that IBM probably will never make a part of the core product. So here's an example of a handy custom @Function that I doubt will ever be native to the XPages implementation of SSJS:

importPackage(javax.xml.parsers);
var @GoogleSuggest = function(partial:string) {
    var resultKey = "googleSuggest-" + partial;
    if (!(applicationScope.containsKey(resultKey))) {
        var results = [];
        var baseUrl:string = "http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=";
        var factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        var parser = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
        var domResult:DOMDocument = parser.parse(baseUrl + partial);
        var resultNodes:DOMNodeList = domResult.getElementsByTagName("suggestion");
        for (var nodeIndex:int = 0; nodeIndex < resultNodes.getLength(); nodeIndex++) {
            var resultNode:DOMElement = resultNodes.item(nodeIndex);
            results.push(resultNode.getAttribute("data"));
        }
        results.sort();
        applicationScope.put(resultKey, results);
    }
    return applicationScope.get(resultKey);
};

If you add that to a SSJS script library, then add the library as a resource on an XPage, then you can easily set the typeahead for any edit box to be the Google Suggest results for whatever value the user types:

<xp:inputText id="search">
    <xp:typeAhead mode="partial" minChars="3" var="partial"
        valueList="#{javascript:@GoogleSuggest(partial)}">
    </xp:typeAhead>
</xp:inputText>